[PoignardAzur]

If you're referring to ICE, that's gross hyperbole, and honestly a little insulting to people who live / have lived in regimes with an actual secret police.

The US is still a rights-based state, which means that when they arrest someone (legitimately or not), lawyers and human right advocates can eventually track them down.

When a secret police disappears someone, they actually disappear. Families can spend years wondering if their loved one is still alive, or was murdered by organized crime, or ran away, or was secretly taken by the state. The US these days is pretty bad, but it's nowhere near that bad.

[doom2]

The arrest of a Turkish graduate student in Boston looked a lot like a kidnapping.[1] More recently, ICE responded to a judge's order to release a detained refugee by threatening to detain her family and send them to Texas if they came to pick her up and then forced the minor child to stay in a hotel room with three agents. [2, p.8] These may not be cases where people are secretly being taken by the state, but it's not hard to see why people might call the government organization detaining people and moving them around so as not to be found "secret police" or "disappearings".

[1] https://youtu.be/oRiQz7mOY6A [2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.230...

[jamincan]

Have you been paying attention? There are reports about hundreds of people going missing in ICE detention. Maybe they aren't being shoveled into mass graves, but if we don't where they are and can't reach them and ICE themselves don't know where they are because they no longer exist in their databases, is there any difference for their families?